hey xanga fans,

well as you can see, i haven't been super consistent posting my thoughts up on this site or anything like that.  i guess i started thinking about all the other stuff that i occupy my time with and realized that, hey, i must really like the other stuff that i do--because i spend so much time doing it.  and so i came to the conclusion that i'm going to spend more time doing other stuff.  so with that being said, sadly, this will be my final xanga posting.  thanks for all the support.  it was fun while it lasted.

peace,

james

This is an excerpt I wrote down a couple of weeks ago but haven't posted until now...

I've been on the run lately (jogging that is!) and it's been pretty fun.  I think one of my first inspirations was picking up a book we had around the house called "Running".  I think it was my dad's but nonetheless it was a book written in the 70's about the benefits of running. 

But anywho...I started to run about a month after I finished the book.  I started by having my parents drop me off at the bottom of my hill on their way to work and I took the trek up.  Last week I had a good time running 2 days in a row with the kid's pastor at our church around the Nike Campus in town.  Those were the hardest runs I've had so far...it's nice to run with a partner because you tend to push each other a little harder.

Today during the midddle of a long period between classes, I took a run on the waterfront in downtown Portland.  That was really cool because you get to run across bridges and along the river all on the same run.

(ps. I'm still running a bit, but not as much as before...)

So for now, I will work busily on studying for my final which will be finished on Wednesday.

The other week I was reminded of the gifts and blessings each person is endowed with. 

In my bible study last week we were studying about this master who gives each of his servants some money to go and invest in something because in x amount of time, the master will return and check up on how everyone is doing.  It turns out that 2 of the 3 servants do well, doubling their return.  The last servant doesn't do much of anything with the money yet he doesn't come back with less money. Yet for the last servant, there is nothing but bad assessments and consequences from the master.  You just come out of the story feeling like you wouldn't want to be in his shoes. 

Well to make a link back to gifts and blessings, the money in the story kind of represents the gifts, abilities, and blessings that we are all endowed with.  And to parallel back to the story, it seems as if we have a choice between using our gifts or just letting those gifts settle and collect dust. 

Later on in the week I was reminded that nobody has the same amount or set of gifts--that's just the beauty of diversity.  For example, some people are musically gifted, others are smart, others are athletically gifted, and yet others are gifted in more than one of these areas.  I was pressed to think of what some of my gifts were and I came up with 2:  ability to listen to others and persistence.  I thought that was a cool insight that I discovered about myself.